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I don’t agree with Joe Rogan about everything, but I love his show just the same. The basic premise is that he brings on people he thinks are interesting, and then has a conversation with them about their areas of expertise. Someone likened it to a Mongol Khan suddenly deciding to get philosophical and making wizards and wise men explain things to him, and it’s not that wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience is the biggest podcast in the world, and many are saying it played a significant role in Donald Trump's return to the White House. I think they’re probably right, though I don’t know to what degree.
This pissed off the…*ahem*…“ladies” on The View.
The hosts of “The View” took aim at podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan — who adopted one of their insults as a badge of honor.
Veteran talk show host Joy Behar called out the world’s most famous podcaster during a conversation about younger Americans getting their news from influencers.
“We went from Walter Kronkite, basically, to this guy Joe Rogan, who believes in dragons,” Behar said incredulously.
“I checked it,” she continues, “and he also believes that dragons, I dunno, like dinosaur-y type of animals, roamed the Earth when people did.
“So this is the type of really, really bad information that is going out there,” she concluded.
Of course, most people get their bad information from The View.
Rogan, however, wasn’t really bothered all that much. Instead, he just trolled the harpies.
Rogan didn’t take the attempted barb too seriously.
The host of “The Joe Rogan Experience” took to X and quoted a clip of Behar delivering her assessment of his esoteric beliefs.“That’s my new official X description,” he wrote — and promptly changed his bio on the social media platform to read, “Dragon Believer.”
Rogan then posted a conversation with biologist and adventurer Forrest Galante titled, “Were Dragons Real Animals?”
Now, understand that he never said dragons are real. He thinks the fact that so many different cultures had something similar is an interesting bit of evidence that there was something that may have been a real animal that gave rise to the legends.
I don’t know that he’s completely out of line, either. Something spurred different cultures all over the world to have some variation of dragons, including parts of the western hemisphere that had no contact with Europe, Africa, or Asia until well after the legends were firmly established.
But Rogan’s show has never been about what Rogan believes. It’s about him asking his guests what they think and letting people decide for themselves.
I’ve walked away from some guests thinking, “Yeah, that guy’s a loon” and others have made me think about topics in new ways.
Yet the real issue here isn’t that Rogan may or may not believe some goofy stuff—and he has believed some weird things, including the moon landing being a hoax, at one time—but that women on The View are bent out of shape because he matters and they don’t.
Seriously, let’s look at some hard numbers.
In this piece from September 16th, The View ranked number one among all daytime talk television shows with 2.93 million viewers.
Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify alone, and now his podcast is available on other platforms. Yeah, with somewhere around 5 times the views, he’s clearly a bigger fish than Whoopi, Joy, Sunny—three of the least appropriately named women on the planet, in my view—and the rest of the gaggle could ever hope to be.
And they hate it.
So they called him a dragon believer and rather than get upset, he just trolls them by making it his description on X. Why wouldn’t he? It’s all just mind over matter. He doesn’t mind because he’s over them and they don’t matter. Why bother punching down when all it would do is give them some kind of legitimacy?
In the process, though, we can see the differences between the two as illustrative of two different ways of thinking in this country.
The View represents the progressive orthodoxy that doesn’t want anyone to question anything, only to accept that which they’re told to accept.
Rogan, however, represents a kind of politically incorrect curiosity that doesn’t just accept that what we’ve been told was true is actually true. He’s willing to ask questions and get the take of people who he’s not supposed to get takes from.
Rogan is a legend, not because he’ll talk to people with strange beliefs but because he’ll talk to people simply because they have interesting beliefs. I think the election showed that we’re tired of authorities telling us what we can and can’t hear, what we can and can’t learn. Rogan represents the idea that we should question things.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.
He should just start calling them dragon deniers and start talking about how they insist, without evidence, that dragons never existed.
Famous Richard Feynman quote:
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."
Rogan is the former. The ladies of The View are the latter.